Developing a Critical Horology to Rethink the Potential of Clock Time’ in New Formations (Special Issue: Timing Transformations)

This is the final accepted version of this article. Bastian, M. (forthcoming) ‘Liberating clocks: developing a critical horology to rethink the potential of clock time’ in New Formations (Special Issue: Timing Transformations). Liberating clocks: developing a critical horology to rethink the potential of clock time Michelle Bastian [email protected] Introduction When trying to imagine a new time, a transformed time, a way of living time that is inclusive, sustainable or socially-just – a liberatory time – it is unlikely that a clock will spring to mind. If anything, the clock has become the symbol of all that 1 has gone wrong with our relationship to time. This general mistrust of the clock is well-captured by literary theorist Jesse Matz who observes: Clock time was the false metric against which Henri Bergson and others defined the truth of human time. Modernists made clocks the target of their iconoclasm, staging clocks’ destruction (smashing watches, like Quentin in The Sound and the Fury [1929]) or (like Dali) just melting away, and cultural theorists before and after Foucault have founded cultural critique on the premise that clock time destroys humanity.1 Thus, across a wide range of cultural forms, including philosophy, cultural theory, literature and art, the figure of the clock has drawn suspicion, censure and outright hostility. When we compare this to attitudes towards maps however – which are often thought of as spatial counterparts to clocks – we find a remarkably differently picture. While maps have 1 Jesse Matz, 'How to Do Time with Texts', American Literary History, 21, 4 (2009), 836-44, quotation p836. This is the final accepted version of this article. Bastian, M. (forthcoming) ‘Liberating clocks: developing a critical horology to rethink the potential of clock time’ in New Formations (Special Issue: Timing Transformations). been shown to be complicit with power,2 they are also widely recognised as objects that can be critically reworked in the service of more liberatory ends.3 Indeed utilising some kind of mapping, such as collaborative mapping,4 participatory GIS,5 or counter-mapping,6 is often central to the work of diverse social movements and participatory projects. In the case of maps then, despite the questionable range of uses to which they have been put, they are nonetheless understood as having the potential to be critical tools that can help rework and reorient our relationship with the world around us. In contrast, it is rare for clocks to appear in repertoires of critical, participatory or activist methods. There is no ‘collaborative clocking’ or ‘counter-clocking’. Instead, the 2 e.g. Jeremy W. Crampton, 'Maps as Social Constructions: Power, Communication and Visualization', Progress in Human Geography, 25, 2 (2001), 235-52.; J. B. Harley, 'Deconstructing the Map', Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 26, 2 2 (1989), 1-20.; Graham Huggan, 'De-Colonizing the Map: Post-Colonialism, Post-Structuralism and the Cartographic Connection', Ariel, 20, 4 (1989), 115-30; Denis Wood, The Power of Maps, New York, Guilford, 1992. 3 e.g. Michael Brown and Larry Knopp, 'Queering the Map: The Productive Tensions of Colliding Epistemologies', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 98, 1 (2008), 40-58.; Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier, 'An Introduction to Critical Cartography', ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 4, 1 (2005), 11-33.; Jay T. Johnson, Renee Pualani Louis and Albertus Hadi Pramono, 'Facing the Future: Encouraging Critical Cartographic Literacies In Indigenous Communities', ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 4, 1 (2005), 80-98.; Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, 'Rethinking Maps', Progress in Human Geography, 31, 3 (2007), 331-44.; Mei-Po Kwan, 'Feminist Visualization: Re-envisioning GIS as a Method in Feminist Geographic Research', Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92, 4 (2002), 645-61.; Marianna Pavlovskaya and Kevin St Martin, 'Feminism and Geographic Information Systems: From a Missing Object to a Mapping Subject', Geography Compass, 1, 3 (2007), 583- 606. 4 L. J. Carton and W. A. H. Thissen, 'Emerging conflict in collaborative mapping: Towards a deeper understanding?', Journal of Environmental Management, 90, 6 (2009), 1991-2001. 5 Christine E. Dunn, 'Participatory GIS: a People's GIS?', Progress in Human Geography, 31, 5 (2007), 616-37. 6 Counter Cartographies Collective, Craig Dalton and Liz Mason-Deese, 'Counter (Mapping) Actions: Mapping as Militant Research', ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 11, 3 (2012), 439-66. This is the final accepted version of this article. Bastian, M. (forthcoming) ‘Liberating clocks: developing a critical horology to rethink the potential of clock time’ in New Formations (Special Issue: Timing Transformations). clock continues to symbolise capitalist forms of control and domination, as well as the constraining of progressive impulses more generally. This paper seeks to counteract these tendencies and argues that clocks have many more interesting possibilities than they are usually given credit for. Like maps, they too have complex relations to social life. Even further, they also have the potential to be reworked as creative responses to a host of social, political and environmental issues. As a result I argue that when seeking to make interventions into the time of politics and of social life we would benefit from paying closer attention to the complex ways clocks and clock time are constructed, while also starting to experiment with making more of our own. As a first step in my argument, I suggest one explanation for why clocks are not generally approached with the similar sense of possibility that maps are. Specifically, I look to continental philosophy as an area that often informs 3 discussions of time and its relationship to politics. I argue that within these literatures there has too often been a dismissal of clocks as unworthy of further analysis, and that this has been based upon an inadequate understanding of how clocks operate. That is, while in human geography maps have been treated as key manifestations of the interplay between power, inscription, material objects and social life, continental philosophers have either read clocks as straightforward representatives of an ‘objective’ or ‘universal’ time, or barely mentioned them at all. Thus, after outlining examples in the work of Bergson, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, I argue that their critiques of the clock, for flattening out the time of experience, in fact rely upon reductive accounts of clock time itself. In particular, their discussion of clocks primarily in terms of measurement misses the fundamentally political nature of any standardised device, while their treatment of clock time as an unending series of nows is overly-idealised. By looking at two cases where clock time has come under fierce debate, I highlight the ways it is better This is the final accepted version of this article. Bastian, M. (forthcoming) ‘Liberating clocks: developing a critical horology to rethink the potential of clock time’ in New Formations (Special Issue: Timing Transformations). understood as non-uniform, embedded within politics, and, most importantly, open to transformation. Thus in the second half of the paper, taking inspiration from critical cartography, I call for the development of a ‘critical horology’. This interdisciplinary endeavour would encourage more curiosity and criticality around clocks, as well as seek to challenge the simplified epochal narrative around clock time and socio-economic change that is dominant across much of the arts, humanities and social sciences. Given the interests of this paper, however, I focus more deeply on a further key task of a critical horology, namely to support experimentation with the form of the clock. For anthropologist Kevin Birth, the dominant forms of clocks offer just one way of dealing with some of the key cognitive challenges around time and timing. Rather than telling time objectively, he argues that clocks are best seen as responses to debates over time, debates which can be responded to otherwise.7 Within this broader horizon for 4 conceptualising the construction and use of clocks, the remainder of the paper discusses the potential for ‘temporal design’, a design approach that has been developed by designers Larissa Pschetz, Chris Speed and myself. Gathering together exemplary work by artists, designers and activists, I show that clocks are not fundamentally tied to linear and objective time, or even necessarily capitalist time, but instead have the potential to be redesigned as part of challenging and transforming dominant understandings of time. The time that ‘destroys humanity’: clocks and continental philosophy Continental philosophy is arguably a field that many turn to when seeking to develop a better understanding of ‘the time 7 Kevin K. Birth, Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. This is the final accepted version of this article. Bastian, M. (forthcoming) ‘Liberating clocks: developing a critical horology to rethink the potential of clock time’ in New Formations (Special Issue: Timing Transformations). of our lives,’ as David Couzens Hoy has put it.8 Indeed Jack Reynolds has suggested that one of the core criteria for being a continental philosopher is a ‘concern with the inter-relation of time and politics’.9 As such, it is common to expect that in order to develop a stronger grasp on these issues at least some time will be spent with the work of philosophers such as the already mentioned Bergson, Husserl and Heidegger, as well as others such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler. When one turns to them for critical perspectives on clocks and clock time, however, their work offers us very little purchase on the problem. Indeed what is striking when one looks for clocks within continental philosophy is that for all the threat they represent, it turns out that, with the exception of Heidegger and Stiegler, very little, if anything, is said specifically about them.

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